All Chapters of THE CHUBBY LUNA THEY REJECTED : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Aina's POV The word still hangs in the air between us, *mate*, unspoken by any mouth in this room, and then Osborne breaks first.He shoves back from the table so fast his chair scrapes hard against the floor, the sound sharp enough to jolt the whole room out of its frozen silence. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't look at anyone. He simply turns and strides out through the nearest door, shoulders rigid, movements too controlled to be anything but a man forcing every muscle in his body to obey him one more time.The room exhales the second he's gone, wolves shifting in their seats, quiet murmurs rising like steam off something that's finally allowed to cool. No one looks at me. No one asks what just happened, or maybe they already understand it better than I do.I didn't stay seated long. Something pulls me up and out through the same door, careful to keep enough distance that he won't sense me right away, though some part of me already doubts that's possible anymore.I find him in

Osborne's POV I'm still turning her face over in my mind long after the hall empties.Not gratitude. Not the quiet relief most wolves show when I intervene on their behalf. Suspicion, sharp and unmistakable, the same look she's worn since the night I claimed her. I shut down an Elder in front of the entire gathering, and she looked at me like I'd done something to be questioned rather than trusted.It bothers me more than it should.*She is hurt,* Varg says, low and unfamiliar in my own skull."Be quiet," I tell him.*You hurt her too.*I go still at my desk. Varg has never once cared what another person felt. Eleven years of violence and hunger and rage, and not once has he spared a thought for anyone's pain but his own need to survive it. Hearing him name hers, unprompted, settles into my chest like something I don't have the tools to examine yet.I summon Kade before I let myself sit with that discomfort any longer."Everything we know about her," I say, when he arrives. "Since sh

Aina's POV The summons comes before I've even had time to process what Mara told me.A servant finds me in the corridor, tells me Osborne wants me in his study now, and something in her tone makes it clear this isn't a request I can politely decline. I go anyway, mark still burning faintly against my collarbone, questions still tangled and unanswered in my chest. I haven't even had time to decide what I'll tell him, if anything, before I'm standing outside his door with my hand raised to knock.He's waiting when I arrive, standing rather than seated, arms crossed, jaw tight enough that I can see the muscle working beneath his skin. The room feels smaller than it did the last time I stood in it, though nothing about its size has changed."You went to Mara," he says, no greeting, no preamble."I did.""What did she tell you?"I hold his gaze steady, even as my pulse picks up. "That's between me and her."Something flashes behind his eyes, fast and sharp. "Nothing in this house is separ

Aina's POV *Just don't expect me to stop anyone else from coming after you.*His words are still sitting heavy in my chest hours later, and maybe that's exactly why I ask Kade to walk the outer boundary with me instead of staying locked inside those walls like Osborne clearly expects me to. Some stubborn, wounded part of me needs to prove, if only to myself, that his warning doesn't get to decide how I live now. I've spent two years shaped entirely by what a man decided I was allowed to do. I refuse to let another one draw the same lines around me, however real the danger behind his warning might actually be.Kade doesn't argue when I ask. He simply falls into step beside me, watchful in a way that tells me he's taking Osborne's warning far more seriously than I'm willing to admit out loud.The cold bites harder than I expect once we're past the tree line. I needed this. After everything with Osborne, the walls of that residence had started pressing in tighter than I could stand, and

Osborne's POV I'm still holding my father's old document when the words finally settle into something I can almost read as meaning.*When the Beast loses himself, the Moon shall return.*I don't understand it. Varg does.*Moon,* he says, and for the first time since I've known him, he doesn't sound aggressive. He sounds reverent, almost aching, the way a man might speak a name he's been forbidden to say for so long he's nearly forgotten how it feels in his own mouth.My fingers tighten around the paper until it creases. "Tell me what you know."Silence stretches long enough that I think he's retreated back into whatever silence he's kept for eleven years. Then, quiet and certain, clearer than I've ever heard him:*She remembers what we forgot.*My blood runs cold. She. Aina. What could she possibly remember that I don't, that generations of Alphas before me apparently didn't either?I remember my father forbidding me from the oldest section of the archive as a boy, standing in the do